As the use of computers and the Internet have proliferated, so too has the use of electronic mail (email). Many businesses, advertisers, organizations, and individuals use email as a prominent or even a primary means of communication. Since email is so easy and inexpensive to send compared to other means of communications such as letters, faxes, and telephone calls, the result is a deluge of email, both solicited and unsolicited, received by email users. One method to deal with all this email is for the user to manually select and file the email in destinations, such as boxes, files, databases, folders, subfolders, directories, subdirectories, or other containers.
Although the problem of received email is particularly acute, users also have a need to sort and file all types of data, whether this data is email attachments, faxes, telephone calls, downloaded programs and data, audio, video, scanned images, photographs, instant messages, files, databases, records, blocks of text or any other type of data.
Because users receive so much data, they often experience difficulty in determining the appropriate destination and in remembering which destinations are available. For example, it is common for users to have multiple folders that store very similar data (e.g. folders named “photos,” “myphotos,” and “pictures”). When a new piece of data is received, the users cannot remember that they already have an appropriate folder in which to store the data, so they create a new, superfluous folder.
What is needed is a technique to help users file their data in an appropriate destination.